Pinterest For iPad Adds Place Pins, iOS And Android Apps Get Animated GIFs

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Pinterest isn’t just for elaborate napkin crafts for your book club soiree, or for bragging about inhuman feats of supernatural cupcakery; it also makes a pretty stellar travelogue. A new update for Pinterest for iPad adds Place Pins to the tablet title, as well as animated GIF support for both iOS applications and the Android app.

Places originally launched in November on Pinterest on the web, and account for over 1.5 million pins per day (there are around 5 million total article pins per day according to stats from December). To date, over 750 million Place Pins have been shared by Pinterest’s network of users, and there are 2 million unique place boards in total on the network.

As for the GIFs, support for animated ones on the iOS and Android apps was built overnight at an internal hackathon at Pinterest. They officially dub these “Make-a-thons,” and they’ll be familiar in concept to anyone who works at a startup: all-nighters where coders crank out improvements that otherwise may not make the daily to-do list.

On the official Pinterest engineering blog, the animated GIF integration was built by a team of two engineers, a design and a localization manager working on it in one day. They launched the feature on the web immediately back in January, and built out mobile support at the same time. You can read more about how it came together behind the scenes over at the Pinterest tech blog where Ludo Antonov describes how they tested the feature before implementation despite the tight deadline.

2014 is set to be a big year for Pinterest, as it plans to generate its first revenue via paid promoted pins from advertisers. CEO Ben Silbermann recently detailed his company’s advertising plans to the Wall Street Journal, though he only discussed a general goal to launch a product by the end of this year, and didn’t outline specific revenue goals or dates.